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The weary traveler should never go without:
water, a good book, a plan
I am in the finishing motions of my Bsc. of science in Bioinformatics, using this blog to share my own experiences with life science and the courses I take.
I post random texts about travel and entertainment

Amino Acids - How to Prep your Memory

For Biochemistry I we had to learn all essential amino acids by heart, sort them according to their properties and be able to draw all of them.

For quick starts I recommend the Amino Acid Quiz by Sporcle on the web - it's like a memory game, where you can measure how much time you need to remember the names when you see the structures.This helped me major at the beginning.

When you need to draw all of them, I can only recommend you to do so. I was able to distinguish all AAs after my 5th round of drawing them, it's really not that difficult, it's even easier when you start drawing them sorted in groups - the properties I mentioned before

Non polar side chains:

Polar side chains:

Electrically charged acidic AAs:

Electrically charged basic AAs:

My best time for the memory quiz I mentioned at the beginning of this post was 45 seconds... Can you beat me ? :p

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